Verity Group Market Analysis - Scope Definition and Strategy Discussion

Hey.

Hey.

Have you gone through their financials?

Verity?

Yeah.

No, just because that wasn't in the scope.

I think it'd probably be helpful for us to understand the business. What is T&M billing? Time and materials? Yes.

I would travel and mileage.

No, I think it's time and materials.

That sounds right. Yeah.

I don't want this one open for me. See here.

Are you looking at their Q of E data book?

I'm actually looking at their website right now. Okay, so on that scratchpad and then going back through kind of like the notes you sent from the call. Pricing and margin benchmarking is going to be hard, and I don't know— it's almost like extra credit. If we think about it from what are we trying to solve for? We're trying to solve for, like, we want money and we want them to be happy with the money they spent on us, right? What I heard them mostly talking about is, what the fuck is this thing? And what I heard us wanting to do was demonstrate almost a disproportionate value. Like, we were trying to do all the things that we do in our day-to-day, right? Um, but pretty like late in the call, Matt Shakley said, I don't know what they do.

Right?

And I'm going through their website, and having looked at some of their competitors' websites, beyond life care planning and maybe medical bill review Reviews and audits, they call things, they name things differently than the other competitors.

Does that include the expert witness piece?

Uh, I'm talking about employability analyses and vocational evaluations. So when you go to those other websites, they call it what it is. It's based loss of earning evaluation. Basically. Um, and at the end of the day, like, although he said, I don't know what it is that they do, I don't know how much that matters. Like, we're not going to be like, they use this book, which I found, which is 9 pages, that they like to do what— like I don't know, like they take injury and say these injuries typically, like we can kind of like speak to how they provide the service or how they, um, I guess benchmark, like at the end of the day they're just benchmarks. This is a benchmarking service. How does that, how does that land?

Well, I think it's a bit.

Um, reductive.

Yeah, because it's like, I mean, you start very low on the toneable, like, yeah, they, they're a benchmarking service, but they have highly technical, like, maybe not highly technical, but they have technical resources to benchmark.

They have credentialed resources to benchmark. Claims. Right. At the end of the day, that's what both of their customers want. They want a life care planner or a lost earning evaluator to benchmark this individual's situation with similar individuals' situations.

I wonder if there's any, like, actuarial data that— I see.

It's funny. That's actually what I'm— that's almost like what I'm getting at is that the book they're using is probably made by an actuary, right? Like this, whatever, 900-page book. Okay. But like, there's like 5 questions that I feel like can really just help. It's like, In looking at some of what Brent was saying, they have no idea how big this industry is. Right. We know they're not in the top 3 players, which means they're probably not, but they might be in the top 5. But the gap between 3 and 4 and 5 might be huge.

Right.

So what is— it's like the question of what is the industry? If we thought about it like that, it's like, how big is it? Who makes it up between service providers and customers? What kind of service providers are there? What are the services they provide? And then on the customers, it's like, Who are they? What matters to them? Why are they using this? It's the same thing where it's like they don't need speed. They need credibility. They need the report to give them the ammo they need to extract or defend some crazy number. Right.

Yeah. Speed is definitely not a a differentiator.

So its ability to stand up to scrutiny.

Yeah.

And on the expert witness side, it's an ability to stand up to a jury of your peers and win. One of the, the competitor— something I thought was interesting in the competitor that Brent sent that is not present on the other two competitors I found is a verdicts page where they actually have a hall of fame of their biggest verdicts they've been a part of.

Right.

And I thought that I had been thinking about that before I saw that on their website. It's like, that's what matters to them is like, if you're going after the personal injury set, if you're a personal injury attorney, you want to know that it's like how personal injury attorneys advertise themselves. They're like, we got $9 million settlement for someone spilling hot coffee on themselves. Right. A personal injury attorney wants to know that their work product is able to help personal injury attorneys succeed in getting and building out their own verdict hall of fame.

So wait, say that, say that part again.

Personal injury attorneys want to know that the work product they receive from a life care planner is going to help them build out their own verdict hall of fame.

It's going to help them reinforce the.

Flywheel.

Like, yes, their ability to generate large settlements.

Attracts other settlements and other potential $10 million settlements, right?

Which is good for life care planners because if they were successful with one, then you have business from 10 more and you create— you get the flywheel effect where people come to the most successful and the most successful are backed by life care planning experts that create the estimates that ultimately result in the.

Highest settlements, which is really a feather in the cap of physician life care planner. This is an opinion, but like, if I'm a personal injury attorney, I bet physician life care planners is the most expensive. I don't know. Doesn't matter anyway. How big is it? Who makes it up? What are the service providers? What matters? And then what risks, if any, are present? If we gave them that, Is that enough for them to— Garrett's calling me. If we gave them that, does that give them like, yes, there's a bunch of other whistles and bells, like competitive analysis and that type of stuff, but like being able to give them that level of information, is that what they asked for? As you look at the notes of the call. Yeah.

I'm going to repeat it back to you. So it's the total addressable market. It's the competitive landscape. And the, like, the full range of potential service providers in this industry, like who is capable of providing life care planning? Because the competitive landscape to me, like—.

But see, I think what we have to do is stop calling it life care planning. Life care planning is a service that these people provide, but it is not— they, they are life care planners and a bunch of other things. I think that Brit and Matt are thinking about it as just life care planning. When I look at all of these other competitors, they do like separate other things that are similar and expert witness testimony, right? But they do 7 or 8 other things. But I don't think— and even though there's an association of life care planners and all these people are part of it, I don't know that they would actually call themselves life care. They definitely call themselves life care planners, but they do a bunch of other shit.

Right. That's not the only service they provide.

Right. So I think what it is is like demonstrating that, like, and the Verity Group speaks to some of this, but it's not clear.

Right. Well, that, that becomes more of a.

Personal injury attorney and you're like, I need a loss earning, loss of earnings analysis, and you Google loss of earnings analysis Cincinnati, Ohio. Let's find out what happens. Loss of earnings. Loss of earnings jury service. Also earnings.

I think this— but this is starting to, um, this is starting to wade more into the like phase 2 of it. Like, what is the actual strategy to kickstarting this business?

No, let's see, my actual point in all of this is just that I at least had fallen into this trap of thinking about this just in terms of life care planning because that's the way it had been communicated to us. When in reality, I think if what we deliver them helps them Goddammit, I fucking hate when Garrett does this.

Shit.

What?

Customer wants to remove owned from vehicle list, but still leave non-owned, hired, and rented vehicles all stay in. We good with that? Seems good. I just never had anyone ask to cross out owned before. I'm saying that if we just give them a port on life care planning, and I'm not necessarily saying like we're going into extreme detail on these other line items. It's just saying, like, it will be pretty apparent. It's like, this is what all of your competitors are doing. And I'm not— I guess it's like the hard thing would be saying it's not intuitive. I want to be able to say it's not clear to us in y'all's marketing that you also do these things. I think you have to really read between the lines.

Well, I, again, I think that goes more into phase 2, but that's okay. I think the question is like— I.

Hear you, you're right.

What are— so what are we actually trying to provide them? We're trying to say, is this business viable? How are we assessing whether this business is viable? It's, are the products that you are offering actually like a— I disagree.

That's not— that's what they're trying to figure out. We're telling them what a market, what the, where the bookends of this little sector.

Okay. Oh, that is actually where I was getting is like, you're saying life care planning. We're looking at your website and saying, here are all the other items or all the other services that you provide, whether you actually provide them or not. Like, if this is in the industry and this is what competitors in the industry are doing, we will give you a scope of work that covers all of these items, not just life care planning, because just we may find that life care planning equals X and, uh, medical liability reviews equal 20X what life care planning is. And you have all the internal, and it's a niche that isn't filled and you have the people on staff to do it. I guess it's like, what can you do with the resources you have? Maybe you're thinking like too narrow with life care planning and there's more opportunity to offer more services that can get more law firms in the door. Ultimately maybe you can upsell that life care planning. But going broader with the addressable market, I think that's what I'm hearing you say.

Is that fair? Yes.

Okay.

Because ultimately, like, and back to your point on like, I think what I was talking about is a phase 2 thing. And you're right, is that it's like.

We'Re not telling you how to go after them. We're just telling you what the market is.

We're just telling you like what it who to— like, who it is that these companies go out, what these companies— what this industry is, what companies are inside of it, including y'all. Um, what service— what are these companies— what are these services these companies do and who are they providing it for?

Right. The Verity Group provides life care planning, uh, market leader of life care planning, also provides these 6 items, like is that that should— is part of the market because your biggest competitor or the biggest firm in the industry offer these services. Like, that is ultimately who you're competing with because they may be able to win the business because of their breadth of offerings.

And that's why I'm saying, like, have really focusing on the competitive analysis piece might be where we get the biggest insights because it's like looking at the amount of practitioners they have on their website, in LinkedIn, etc., like, it might be that, like, if they're not in the top, like, the top 3 of anything, like your oligopoly, duopoly type thing.

Like.

It might be that they are either looking to sell to, like, I, I don't know, you know what I mean? Right. Again, I'm inferring I'm starting to infer there, but it's like, I guess the point is really just focusing on like maybe what it is is the competitive analysis is it's a compare and contrast, not a compare and contrast with the Verity Group, but it's a compare the three large, like detail the three biggest competitors that OAS life care physician. But I guess, sorry, to tie all this up to the deliverable and what we're giving them, it's like trying to make it clear to them that we're not going to go tell them how the Verity Group stacks up. We're going to spend virtually little to no time assessing how does the Verity Group exist in this space. Because that would require a bunch of like opinions and analysis. And that's a different exercise, I guess.

Yeah, because we're not evaluating their business, we're evaluating the industry. Verity Group is a— we're looking at it from the outside in effectively because we're not necessarily worried about the Verity Group's financials. Like we have high-level information, but they'll be able to ask— neither of us.

Have fucking opened it because we don't care because we're just like, what is this thing?

Right.

And the reason why I think that this is maybe helpful, it's like they even said it's like they should have done this before they bought the business, but they didn't, which actually means they don't have this capability internally.

Right.

Like this isn't— this is— we're getting a live look at their practice. But anyway, like we are— I think there's worth— I don't know whether we do this or not, but like if you think about it, that is also what we did for 5 years before jumping into Avon. And have really continued to kind of do since, just not as often. So like going from zero to understanding kind of like the parameters, I think about the global business center deck, like, yeah. Anyway, that is my point in all of this. It's just like getting, getting back to them with a like This is what we heard you guys say. We have experience in doing this, which is like going from zero to understanding the high level, like basically understanding where an industry or a sector begins and ends and what happens inside of it. What are the big players? What do they do? What are risks? What are trends, if, if possible, you know, and stop there. Like, it's almost like one big— it's like an IBIS report with a competitor analysis, right? And like, I think talking to— I think like we can get some solid qualitative stuff by still talking to that, like paying to talk to a life care planner. And I think it is helpful to attach it to expert witness industry and legal services. Thing because like it is part of that. It is that. And like understanding like, is that going to die?

Right.

Or like, is there anything on the horizon that shows— because like whatever, AI is achieved and like who the fuck actually knows? But like barring that, probably not going to happen, black swan. Like, um, there will be like 12%. But it's like presenting whatever is kind of on the horizon there without an opinion. And I guess my point in all of this is just saying we're not going to have opinions. And that's what I'm saying. We're going to be telling them, we're not going to give you opinions on the industry. We're not going to give you opinions on Verity Group. We're not even going to really give you opinions on like the competitors. We're going to like provide you with a bunch. We are— our initial plan is just to provide you with a bunch of information for you to like develop opinions on and, you know, go from there if you want us to. Like build out a sales strategy, or if you want us to build out an M&A pipeline, or if you want us to like those other stuff too, back to what you're saying, that's your phase 2 stuff.

So do we want to include a phase 2 like scope in there, or do we just say here is like, here's what our analysis will COVID leave it at that?

I think you put the phase, I think if we get them to agree to this, Then in our deliverable, we're giving them phase 2 add-ons of where.

We would go from there.

Yeah, where it's like, for another— for $50,000, we'll build out a pipeline. For $200,000, we'll work on it. Right, right. That's kind of where— that's what— that's where my head is at, because what I'd like to do is turn it around in like 4 to 6 weeks. And I think within that time frame, we should be able to get a lot of stuff done. We've got— we've already pulled together a lot of stuff, so it's really just sifting through it, parsing, and like distilling. And then getting some of the more like getting some of the primary and more qualitative stuff done, which is just a function of like cold outreach. Like we're going to have to smile and dial and email and like chase down time with people. But I think like I still think we talk to— I still think we talk to a personal injury attorney.

Agreed.

I still think we talk to a single shingle life planner.

Agreed.

I think we try to talk to someone on the insurance carrier side. But now that I'm thinking about it, the person you're talking to on the insurance carrier side is the fucking legal department of the insurance carrier.

Yes, that's— yeah. What's your point there?

It's still lawyers.

It's specialized lawyers, but yeah, lawyers.

Point being, it's It's just lawyers. The customers are lawyers either way, however you skin it.

Right. That's true.

It's lawyers working on behalf of the plaintiff. It's lawyers working on behalf of the defendant. And I think like calling it insurance companies, it just becomes kind of this like monolith where you think there's like the life care planning department or something, which they probably should have. But like, it's just the lawyers and it's a box that they have to check. Like, and probably what happens is they get— AmTrust is calling me. Standby.

AmTrust.

This is James.

Hello, I'm calling from the AmTrust. I'm reaching out in reference to workers' compensation claim that was filed, and I was just wondering if there's anybody that I'd be able to speak with about a potential employee of your company.

Totally. Um, do you— who's on file currently? Let's, let's make sure we have proper contact info.

However, that address doesn't look like it's an address that you're covered by. So I just wanted to see if this person's been like ending in 48.

Interesting. Was the— what was the address? Can I guess? Is it 7080 Santa Monica Boulevard? Interesting. Uh, it helps me understand where it might be coming from because we bought, we bought the business, um, 4 years ago and it was at that address then. And then we moved it a month later to an address in Burbank. And then, you know, we haven't occupied that space since we bought the business.

Um, Two Hands Enterprises, and it was like a laundry type of work. At least quick Google search is what it came up with, that they, they did garment pressing.

Oh, interesting. You know what the address probably came up was, was the other company that came as part of this, which was Two Family Enterprises., which has also a different company named Two Family Enterprises, which is exactly that, a laundry company. Um, anyway, here's what I'd like to do. I want to get you to, um, our chief of staff and our entire kind of workers' comp team that works on this stuff. Her name's Katie Svenson. She's.

Amazing.

Um, you know what, I— she just got married to— her last name is Keeler. K-E-E-L-E-R. L-E-R. Um, and her— it's Katie, K-A-D-Y, and she can be reached by email at [email protected]. And then let me give you her cell phone number as.

Well.

All right. That number is 310-741-7199. 7199. That's correct. And so she will be able to give you any kind of employer employee records that we may.

Have. Um, you might be an employee of the other company, so I'll reach out to her, see what I find. Do you want to be kept in the loop at all, or do you just— will she be the main contact?

You know what, if you put me in the loop, I'll just slow everything down. So, um, Katie is the best point of contact, and she will get you plugged into her workers' comp team if applicable. And for anything else going forward, she's going to be the best point of contact, except I just remembered she's going on maternity in 2 months. So that's okay, we'll need to figure that out, but that's not your problem. Angela, thanks so much. Bye. They just want to know what this industry is, and I think they want to know who the customer— like, okay, so we've told them what the industry is. What do they really want to do with that? They want to know. I think they want to be able to know how to grow. So if we tell them— so our, like, in telling them what the industry is, we're telling them who the customers are and hopefully what matters to them. But that's intuitive. That's already on their website, right? I will bet you $10 they have not read their website.

Oh, yeah, most.

Definitely. So we'll tell them what matters to them. To the customers? We'll tell them basically how fragmented is it. Like what we show them should show, should show something to the effect of like there's just a throwaway number, but like there's 3,000 life care planners across the country competing over however big we, however big of a market we say it is. Right. Like kind of the interesting thing is that this whole industry is like one giant catastrophe away from quintupling in size for like a couple of years.

Right, right. It's a hit-driven industry. What's that? It's a hit-driven industry.

Yes.

Like it's akin to— they're one 9/11.

Away from— or they're one like plant explosion away from having a banner year. Right.

Right.

Okay. That is— that's honestly like, that's an interesting— I don't know if it's an interesting soundbite, but it's a helpful heuristic because it's like part of the trend. It's like what feeds— interesting. It's almost like when we think about risks to the industry, we should think about what feeds their customers. Well, what feeds personal injury attorneys are car.

Accidents.

Okay, I'm going with that.

Yes, but I wouldn't— I would argue that they don't— car accidents are not what— car accident is not what feeds the industry. It's people looking with cases, people actively searching out cases. That from whatever debilitating, like, event happened in their life. I mean, I know it's kind of— that's kind of a nuanced piece of it, but it's like, it's not just like the, the accident itself, it's what— it's people motivated to go try to get paid as a result of things.

Happening. Okay, so I think Okay. Yes, that's a balanced approach to it. But think of it as like what generates the overwhelming majority of their work.

I guess my point is that the— what am I trying to say? I think what I'm trying to say is that It is not just like people can get hurt all they want, but if they're not coming, if they're the ultimate pipeline to getting settlements, doesn't run through them, it doesn't necessarily matter. So like what makes the industry work, what makes the industry viable is not just people getting hurt. It's that they are intertwined with.

This.

With this, all these steps to ultimately getting a payout from an insurance company. Like, it's not, it's not that life care planners exist just because people get hurt and they know they need it. It's because they exist to get to justify a very high payment. Like, all these, this whole industry exists to provide expert-level service to make sure that people are able to maximize their financial outcomes.

Whatever that may be, whether that's number go up or number go down.

Right, right.

I just— I want to have the— did you have the voice recorder on for that?

Yeah, the voice recorder has been on the whole.

Time. Great. Um, okay, but hang on, just to put a period on what I was talking about earlier. If their customers are personal injury attorneys, if a big piece of their— if they're a big piece of their business, if a big piece of this industry's business is personal injury attorneys, personal injury attorneys, majority of their work is fed from car accidents, and car accidents are projected to go down with the increase of self-driving cars. Then this industry too therefore should also go down, right?

But that's a phase 2 thing. Like, the risks— we're not doing a risk analysis to the industry. We're not doing AI disruption. That effectively is AI disruption. If, um, like, there's a lot of ways it can manifest. If there's fewer car accidents, if there's fewer people working in warehouses because the robots are doing some of that higher—.

I do think we should. I do think we are doing a minimal risk analysis. And like, it can just be that, like what we just said.

Is— Well, I guess it's more of like a bull and bear case, like a 5-year projected. It's not like we're carving out a specific like section of a presentation to talk about risk.

I'm not trying to quantify it as like there's a Like, I'm not trying to quantify the percentage decrease in annual traffic accidents as a result of self-driving cars. I'm trying to put a qualitative soundbite there. All of— a lot of this is going to be more— I don't even know if qualitative is the right word. It's just like, it's a thing in the ground. It's a flag in the ground that's informed by somewhere else. We're just aggregating, collecting stuff to contextualize this.

Sector.

Right. Fair enough. So we're not trying to give them anything but like a— like an aggregation of customary data points one would expect to have. In buying a company in this sector, because I think, like, candidly, we're not the guys to do a ton of that next-level analysis. It would be a first time for.

Us. You talking about the next-level analysis being more like scoped to the the company itself.

Right? Yes. And the next level analysis of like, what, what do we think the life care planning industry will decrease as self-driving cars increases, percentage of self-driving cars increases? You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not us. So, but I think like being able to draw that parallel for them is helpful. Well, it's not even for us to decide what's helpful or not. Like, it's for us to like put as much stuff as we think will be helpful and they tell us what is helpful and what is.

Not.

And so ultimately, with the 15 minutes we have left, like, I want to, I want to bring this back to them with a price tag and without there being anything necessarily for them to grab onto to try to pencil-fuck away $5K off of $25K. It's like, it's a, it can be a standalone document. It can be just in the body of an email. It can't be Although this is— this email summary he sent is so dope.

No, I— it needs to be more— less glamorous.

But this is such— this is so killer, this thing that you said. I know. Like, it's so cool. Like, the fact that it stripped out just a direct quote and attributed it to just Dash Brent. Yeah. Like, it's amazing. Anyway, I think there's stuff we can pull from this, but we can't just forward this on.

No. Well, here's what my plan is. Basically, I'm going to have it take the transcript of our conversation here. I think we're aligned on kind of what it needs to look like. I'm going to have it put it together, a new, like, scope of work, and then we'll take a look at that and then we'll edit it to be more our tone, but just build the— like, get the foundation of it set, and then you can kind of put your pieces on it that you want to come through like it's coming from you, because you have a very specific way of communicating with Brent.

Especially. For better or for worse, I've been reading a lot. I've been trying to read as much as I can. About kind of that concept of smart brevity and this guy trying to adopt this guiding heuristic of like when sending an important email, reread it and take out every single word that you can, like entire sentences if possible, because it does not matter.

Right. It's, yeah, it's, it's, I don't know.

If I told you this, but like that whole real estate project my brother is like working on and working through and stuff. I'm, um, in talking with him for like an hour, this is the other brother, in talking with him for like an hour and asking him just like a simple question and just getting a monsoon, like a typhoon of data and context back and having to just cut him off the way Larry cut me off and be like, okay, just stop. I don't, I don't need that. I just need a simple question. Like, all that stuff is for you, right? And for people that understand it. But it's like, I don't know. But at the same time, this isn't going to Larry. It's going to theoretically the people who will make decisions on it. I might sidebar with Brent on that.

Well, it's a signaling thing. That's where I was going to get to. It's like a lot of consulting is showing that you did the work and a lot of like that work is nonsense and there's key pieces of it that need to be pulled out. But like the, it's the, like not saying we're McKinsey, but when you put the McKinsey stamp on something, it's not because you're giving them Like they're not giving you data and information that you can't get everywhere else. It's that now you can outsource the like, well, look at this report. How can you make a bad decision based on this great report? Right. It's the ability to like have a document to point to or a plan to point to in the event something does like go sideways. So you did your work.

Right?

Okay. Okay. I'll let the— Do that. Yeah, I'll send you another draft of this.

Okay, and then send me another calendar invite to just block the time that we'll plan on just polishing and sending it. Okay. For today, if you can.

Okay. I'll send you one for like 2. Does that.

Work? Yeah. All right, bye-bye.